All posts filed under: Arts

Central figure of the Japanese photography, Daido Moriyama is currently exhibited at the Fondation Cartier for contemporary art, in Paris, from the 6th of February to the 5th of June 2016, in an exhibition called “Daido Moriyama, Daido Tokyo“. Moriyama excels in capturing Tokyo’s ever-transforming atmosphere, the effervescence of the streets, the shops, and the people who make this city, flows and trafic, luminescent lights, eye-catching posters or billboards with garish colors, and tiny urban details. Take a look at his work, and you might be transported into a vibrant and imperturbable Tokyo. Mahaut Le Lagadec

Created and choreographed by Mourad Merzouki, Director of the Centre national chorégraphique of Créteil, “Yo Gee Ti” is a Franco-Taiwanese choreographic piece for ten dancers that emerges us into a deep trance oscillating between hip hop, break and ballet. Some strange ropes made of wool are hanging above the stage and, at some point, the dancers are wearing traditional costumes, in wool as well, designed by the Taiwanese stylist Johan Ku. The violons are playing a swinging music, the movements are precisely executed, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, always harmonious. The stage turns into a forest, then into rain, or into a constellation of duets, tied to waist, creating an impression of illusion. This piece is a moment of magic. Mahaut Le Lagadec

Author of several books, « Contemporary Art in Hong Kong » (2013), « New Japanese contemporary art » (2012), or, more recently, « After 2000: contemporary art in China », (2015), French-born Caroline Ha Thuc is a Hong-Kong based writer and curator. She answers our questions about the new contemporary art scene in Asia. Moderneast Magazine: What is your view on the young or emergent creation in Asia: which assets does it have, how do you see its future both in Asia and in Europa? Caroline Ha Thuc: It is hard to talk in general about the emerging creation in Asia. Which Asia is concerned? Where should we begin? There no unified Asian art form. It is varied, diverse and even indefinable. Art overruns maps and borderlines and scrambles nationalities. The artists themselves increasingly claim to be artists from the world, and not from such or such country. To answer your question I guess artists from the region can generally benefit from a growing population of collectors, a boom in museums’ spaces (what we now call the “museumification” of China for …

Born in Saitama in 1967, Japanese artist Noriko Ambe, now living in NYC, is mainly working through a process of cutting which is particularly spectacular. Her works are currently exhibited at The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Jan. 31 – May 29, 2016) and at the Everhart Museum (Feb. 5 – June 6, 2016). Let’s meet her and learn more about her project. Moderneast Magazine: What would you like to say to people who don’t know your work and see your pieces, installations and cuttings for the first time? Noriko Ambe: Actually, for those who see my work for the first time, I am not going to guide them how to see it. I’m more interested in what they feel, imagine, or think through my work, and I hope they won’t just focus on the technique of cutting. MM: How do you consider the process of cutting ? What is the intellectual, or artistic, path that guides your work? NA: Through my cuttings, I’m thinking about, what is time ? Time is essential to my work. Because over time I add more and more paper …

From January to May 2016, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will be dedicated to the Chinese art scene through a blockbuster exhibition called “Bentu, Chinese artists in a time of turbulence and transformation“ which will bring together 12 relatively unknown artists from different generations. This exhibition, the first to be devoted to contemporary Chinese art in France in the past 10 years, and which has been created in collaboration with the Ullens Center in Pekin, will explore the different meanings of Bentu (native land, in Chinese), a notion which is today at the very heart of many Chinese artists’ creative process. It implies reflecting on history, geography, the relation to the land, as well as identity or individuality. She will also try to examine how China’s creative traditions are dealing with the ever-evolving world that consecrates new techniques of production or creation. The works which are showcased, stemming from the use of a wide range of medias and materials, are the best demonstration of the complexity that characterizes today’s Chinese artistic scene. According to the Fondation, “the choice of works does …

The exhibition currently running at Galerie Perrotin, in Paris, curated by PARK Seo-Bo and called “Origin”, comes back on the eponymous movement which was initiated in 1962 in Korea and which gathered a few graduates from the prestigious Hongik University, in Seoul. His original founders, CHOI Myoung-Young, SUH Seung-Won, and LEE Seung-Jio, who participate in this group show, exploit History, their own human frailties, as well as their recollections and memories of the conflicts they experienced (the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, the 4.19.1960 Revolution) to explore abstraction and render the sensation in its pure form. Their work is a crucial milestone in the history of Korean Art. “ORIGIN” CHOI Myoung-Young, LEE Seung-Jio et SUH Seung-Won Curated by PARK Seo-Bo 9 January – 27 February 2016 at Galerie Perrotin, Paris Mahaut Le Lagadec

Wei-Hui Hsu, born in 1979 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, studied in the US from 2004, after graduating from National Hsin-Chu University of Education. She currently lives and works in Taiwan. Her full-scale installations and smaller mixed-media pieces aim to develop poetic or organic themes such as the female body or the cell function. She uses various materials that she collected, transforms and shapes them into new forms that contain « special metaphors or meanings ». Her work is particularly striking and vivid as it presents « layers of contradiction and vulnerability » from her own experiences. Indeed, she seeks to express « a kind of pain under the appearance of beauty ». Hsu, through her pieces, is proceeding to a self-examination and she wants the observer to do the same. So, throw yourself into the stunning and delicate, yet impressive sculptures stemming from her series called “Feminine”… In 2015, she participated in numerous group shows, in London (“Art 15 London”), Taiwan (“Art Kaohsiung 2015”), China (“The Moment: Like Flower”, Yi Chao Museum), or Taipei (“Art Taipei 2015 ”), among others. She also presented …

Kazumi Nakamura, born in 1956 in Chiba, Japan, began his career in the early 1980s. He has since become one of the most renown and active painters of his generation, creating paintings that experiment the notion of pictorial space. Some might say that his work lies at the crossroads of different movements such as Japanese post war groups, like Mono-Ha or Gutai, and the contemporary movement Superflat, founded by Takashi Murakami. Most of his large-scale paintings are made of a multitude of abstract motifs and geometrical patterns, sometimes following disorderly fluctuations, sometimes perfectly aligned. Brushstrokes, angular spatial structures, accumulations, distortions, diagonal grids and infinite lines may sometimes produce some visual illusions by which one becomes quickly captivated. In Nakamura’s work, the explosion of colors is a very enjoyable, and sometimes mesmerizing, vision. Mahaut Le Lagadec

The success of Nan Arayo released in 1992 by the boys band ‘Seo Tai-ji and boys’ marks the beginning of the Korean pop music style, commonly known as the ‘K-pop’. The K-pop is a very diverse music style, with the particularity of mixing musical elements coming from other countries with Korean ones: it involves dance-pop, pop ballad, electronic, rock, hip hop, Rn’B… Basically, all the « popular » music from Korea are K-pop style, the most famous representative of K-pop worldwide being Psy. His song Gangnam Style got more than 2.4 billions views on Youtube, which makes it today the most viewed video on the website. In 2012, the Time magazine presents K-pop as ‘the most profitable exportation from South Korea’, and it is difficult to say the opposite: in 2012, the K-pop market worthed a $3.4 billions (coming mainly from the « BigThree », the 3 biggest South Korean record companies: SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment). The South Korean government is completely aware of that success and implements what the Ministry of Culture calls ‘한류‘ (pronounced ‘Hallyu’), …